The Infinite Monkey Cage - 200 Years of Frankenstein

Episode Date: July 25, 2016

Brian Cox and Robin Ince mark the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. They are joined on stage by Noel Fielding, evolutionary biologist Nick Lane and writer and expert in popular culture, Sir Christopher Frayling. They'll be looking at the cultural impact of this epic novel, and the long lasting impact it has had on the perception of science and scientists. They'll also be looking at the real science behind some of the ideas about life and the creation of life that Mary Shelley explored.

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcast. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And this is the Infinite Mug Cage podcast, which is a longer version than the one you hear broadcast on Radio 4. Let me stop you there because you have to define what you mean, because it could just be longer because you're moving at

high speed relative to the listener. Oh, yeah, I hadn't really thought of that. Well, I suppose longer in terms of the minute measurement. You see, you're getting into trouble now. Oh, this is really much harder than I thought. You can define it in a particular frame of reference. So you can say in this particular frame of reference where the player is at rest relative to the listener, then the recording you may have made off the radio is shorter than the recording on the podcast. Thursday? Is that a frame of reference, Thursday?

It's roughly speaking, I suppose. It's a starting point, isn't it? Yeah. It's quite imprecise. This is the Infinite Monkey Cage extended version. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. Now, usually I have the upper hand because this is a science show,

but today there's a strong literary component. So my colleague Robin, who is a BA Ons in English. And two-time guest on quote-unquote. Yes, GK Chesterton fans, look at me and weep. Yes, Robin has the edge. So, where is this sentence from, Robin? Test. Did I request thee, maker, from my clay to

mould me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me? I think I know this one. I believe it is My Struggle Conversations with Tony Hart and Morph. No, and probably yes as well. It's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Now, of course, until recently,

Frankenstein was the archetypal mad scientist until the media invented a new, more expensive one. Look. Oh. Look at that as well. I'm filled with magic and electricity. Today, we're talking about Frankenstein.

June 17th was the 200th anniversary of the night Mary Godwin, soon to become Shelley, first recounted the story of the creation of a living being from inanimate matter, a process that we now know happened on Earth four billion years ago. Of course, for the purposes of balance, when we say no, we can say there are other ideas that other people do also know, which include, obviously, panspermia

as a possibility, the gendered rib hypothesis, and of course, classically, snake malice and the evil apple. I have to admit, I found it almost irresistible not to say snake malice and the evil apple in the style of John Peel. There we go, that was snake malice and the evil apple.

I think we'll be hearing quite a lot more from them in the coming weeks. What does the story of Frankenstein, the modern Prometheus, mean in the 21st century? We are joined by a panel of scientists, experts and grave robbers, and today they are... I'm Nick Lane, I'm an evolutionary biochemist at University College London and my favourite fictional monster, well, there's quite a few of them, but I'm going to have to go, as a writer, I have to go with the Vogons,

the poetry reading Vogons in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. you're reading Vogons in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I'm Christopher Frayling. I'm a cultural historian, professor of cultural history, and I used to run the Royal College of Art. And I write about monsters and things and literature and film. And my favourite... It's very difficult. You know, the Brits are very good at monsters,

probably because we're so repressed. Think about it. And actually, the science of monsters, you know, it's called teratology. Did you know that? The study of monsters? I bet you didn't know that. Anyway, my favourite monster would probably be Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein, who has a wonderful Nefertiti hairdo with a sort of streak of electricity in it,

because she's put her fingers in the mains. It's absolutely marvellous. Don't ask me to imitate her. Hello, my name's Noel Fielding. I've played quite a lot of monsters, actually. Old Greg, the sea transsexual. Spirit of Jazz, with his hat on fire. Lots more, but I can't remember any of them. My favourite... Who's my favourite

monster? Why, it's difficult. I want to say Donald Trump now, but I can't remember any of them. My favourite... Who's my favourite monster? Oh, it's difficult. I want to say Donald Trump now, but I can't. It's like a ginger Godzilla. It's difficult, but I think maybe Calaboss from Clash of the Titans is my favourite monster. Oh, that's a good choice there. Calaboss is kind of Pan-like monster, isn't he? Yeah, and when I was... I was probably about eight when I first saw Clash of the Titans.

It was around about the same time that my parents were quite into ACDC, so somehow I fused the singer of ACDC, Bon Scott, with Calaboss and got a bit freaked out by that combination of a sort of pan-like character in leather trousers. And this is our panel! Thank you all! Christopher, you mentioned Bride of Frankenstein, which of course I don't know, is it the final line?

We belong dead? We belong dead, says Karloff. His final line. Yes. Actually, they got it wrong. It isn't the Bride of Frankenstein, it's the Bride of the Monster. And people very often confuse the name of the scientist with the name of the monster, which is interesting because they're kind of two sides of the same coin so the bride it should actually be the bride of the monster you see what i mean he's not frankenstein's bride

she's not yeah or the creature they call him the creature creature yes in the book you know he's called the creature until he's born and then he starts getting called the monster which is interesting and people start treating him as a monster, so he becomes more monstrous. But he's the creature before then. It's quite neutral. Why do you think it is? I mean, Frankenstein is, as we said, it's 200 years since Mary Godwin actually dreamt it up, and it permeates so much of culture.

For 200 years, it was a play, I think, within about five years of it being published, and then was many times adapted. What is it about that story which means so many things and so many different things to so many people? Why? Well, I think it's partly the social responsibility of science theme. Scientists considering a sort of ethic of care versus an ethic of control.

And scientists thinking hard about the implications of what they're doing and not saying, you know, I'm a pure scientist, it's the applied people that do it don't blame me uh it's partly about masculine science you know mary godwin felt strongly that you know the chaps were getting too much publicity for this um but actually originally uh frankenstein uh the first draft of it has been published now the manuscript is is in the Bodleian in Oxford. And it's much more pro-science than the published version, that Mary Godwin was really interested in science. And it's the first novel ever about the education of a scientist.

So we get, you know, Victor Frankenstein going to the University of Ingolstadt and going through this amazing curriculum, which is basically the whole history of science up to 1816, and feeling unsatisfied by it. You know, it's not big enough for him. going through this amazing curriculum, which is basically the whole history of science up to 1816, and feeling unsatisfied by it. You know, it's not big enough for him. It's getting too experimental, too small, too specialised.

I want to answer the big questions. So it's the very first novel ever written about the education of a young scientist. And she felt very strongly about the importance of science, but she also felt that there was a danger that scientists weren't giving second thoughts to what it was they were doing. Then, when it came out in a popular edition, she loses those nuances, loses a lot of the specific scientific references, and makes science into the bogeyman.

She was kind of playing to the public, and also, I think, you mentioned the play version, 1823. She's looping the melodrama version into the novel. And so it becomes more and more gruesome in its depiction of science, and it gets into the bloodstream as very negative, as the image of the mad scientist. And in recent times, you know, the prefix Frankenstein's been applied to so many things. You know, in the 20s, it was chemistry and gas because of the First World War. In the 30s, it was medicine. In the 1950s, it was nuclear.

In the 60s, it was DNA. And then test tube babies, remember that phrase? And then Frankenstein foods. And now artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. And the prefix Frankenstein has been applied to all of it. So it's come to stand for all our anxieties about scientific innovation, all distilled into this kind of metaphor. But it makes it much cruder than the original novel,

which actually is saying, let's hear it for science, but let's hear it for science which is thoughtful, which is what Mary Godwin wanted. You know, she grew up in a household where Humphrey Davy and all the great scientists of the day would come to supper. I mean, she knew all these people. In fact, the curriculum at Victor Frankenstein's university is based on Humphrey Davy's lectures. So she was into science, not an anti-science person at all. And Shelley, who became her husband,

you know, he ran voltaic batteries in his rooms in Oxford. He tried to revivify a dead cat when he was an undergraduate. And he was into... We've all tried to do that. All these bubbling retorts and glass jars and electricity were in his rooms as an undergraduate, but he was an arts chap. And so that's another thing in the story, that it's about before specialism, before the word scientist was invented, they're natural philosophers. And, you know, you could be a humanities person and a science person

both at the same time, which Victor Frankenstein is, which Shelley was. And there's an important lesson there as well, I think. What is your view of it? No, because your comedy has a gothy care. I have played a lot of goths, actually, and vampires and goblins. I've been typecast.

But I was thinking about the story of Frankenstein and thinking that, I don't know if I've ever if i've ever because the bush we used to borrow stories loosely um the island of dr morrow was one that we were really interested in and in the zoo that we were based in uh bob fossil was making animals out of lots of different animals sort of fusing them like a sort of collage um but we were quite into hg wells and we were quite into but I was thinking did we ever do a Frankenstein I was thinking about because we used to sort of try and nail down the sort of gothic sort of story that we were

sort of emulating and then actually I thought in my latest live show I made a plasticine Jerry Ramone like a big tall plasticine and he yeah alright and I'm 43 and basically he was in a plasticine world, but there was a doorway into it, like Narnia,

and I opened it and he came out and urinated in my face. So it was a little bit like a punk Frankenstein in a way, where he was sort of coming out and causing mayhem. You know, I'd created this monster and it was trying to kill me. Now, Nick, in your laboratory, you do very similar work, don't you, really, in terms of... Not necessarily the latter stage of it.

Not exactly either a large plasticine Jerry Ramone, but nevertheless, apart from the Jerry Ramone work, can you show just how much you and Noel work together, really, in terms of these ideas? You do that, but in terms of what you're actually dealing with, in terms of your understanding of life, which has far less urination or, indeed, Ramones-based work to it. It's one of the great Inns questions.

No, it's not even a question at the moment. I'm just kind of trying to do a transfer from the plasticine Ramone into the science, which is a little bit more awkward than I imagined. And it's exactly what I expected from you, Noel, as well. I never expected an easy segue from anything you said. So explain that a little bit further, Nick, about the origin of life. So what are you... First of all, in fact, have you been inspired by...

We mentioned HG Wells there, of course, wrote a great deal about science, we were talking about Shelley. Is there any point where you find in fictional works an inspiration for real scientific ideas? No. Well, that's good. Let's move on to... APPLAUSE I kind of hesitate to say that because, you know,

I used to read a lot of fiction and I read very little fiction now, but scientists don't come well out of fiction, do they? I'd quite like to read this earlier version of Frankenstein now that you've put it in my mind. But it's like in the movies, isn't it, that when the scientists are goodies, they're always saints, like Marie Curie or Edison the man and all these things. And there's no scientist in the

middle. They're either demons or saints. And this middle area where it's rather boring and you're filling in research applications, you don't get films about that, do you? I used to read things like Jim Watson's Double Helix. Those were the real inspirations to go into science. And they were coming from scientists, really.

And the novels, I think, I... You know, there were other heroes who were not scientists. Probably the closest I got to it was Dr Faustus, who I rather liked as a character. And he kind of slithers gently... ..into quite an unpleasant character by the end. But it takes him a while. He was quite a cultivated character to begin with.

I think that's the scary thing, isn't it it the way that cultivation degenerates into being a monster and it usually happens to people who know too much for their own good and that's usually put into scientists and so i think you kind of back away a little bit as a scientist so again in this post-fact world this is the right time to do this show it's a warning to everyone don't know things if you start to know things, it'll become a burden. But you are actually working in the lab genuinely on working out the idea of what

creates life. I am actually the modern Frankenstein. Yes, I'm trying to create life in the lab, but rather than trying to reanimate a body, I'm trying to do it from scratch and just start with molecules. And, well, we've just got more molecules so far. That's all we've got. But perhaps you could describe the experimental setup you've got.

So it's at UCL, isn't it? Yeah, so in a way it's similar because we're trying to use electricity. And the idea of reanimating a creature, animating a creature by some immediate electrical shock, which somehow then brings it to life permanently. Well, that's not really how life works. You give it electric shock, it's going to move its arms,

but it's not going to continue moving around except as some kind of a zombie. What we actually have inside us is a continuous electrical current, which is coming from burning food in oxygen and we're breathing all the time and that's where it's coming from and that that's at a microscopic level but curiously enough the the actual charge on the membranes of the cells that that's keeping us alive is equivalent to a bolt of lightning if you get if you shrink yourself down to the size of a molecule, it's that kind of size of charge.

It's 30 million volts per metre. So that's the kind of charges that you find in hydrothermal vents down at the bottom of the ocean on that same kind of scale, and that's the kind of environment where we think that life might have started. So the question is, can that kind of natural electrical charge in a hydrothermal vent animate inorganic molecules into organic molecules that have particular shapes and structures and behaviour that start to grow and divide and so on?

So that's the question, and it really is a kind of Frankenstein question. It's really interesting, because a couple of nights before Mary Godwin told the story of Frankenstein, you know, 200 years ago, Shelley and Barrow were discussing exactly that, a thing called the vitalist controversy, which is where does the original spark of life come from? And the controversy was between a chap called Lawrence, who said that, you know, the spark basically came from biology,

this sort of biological process, versus a man called Abernethy who said the spark came from God. And it was the Richard Dawkins controversy of its day. Did it all... What kick-started life originally? Was it God or was it biology? And they were actually discussing that two nights before, and obviously Mary Godwin was listening to this conversation, she says so, and she went away and started writing Frankenstein.

So it's dead-on for your work, actually. Lawrence was... He was even more violent than Richard Dawkins in his language, wasn't he? on for your work, actually. Lawrence was even more violent than Richard Dawkins in his language, wasn't he? He said he wanted a description of life that was devoid of absurd fables and intellectual mist. Yeah. Sounds like straight Dawkins.

But it's interesting at that time, because we're talking about the turn of the 19th century. So was it a live debate then? Because it seems almost too early to have a very violent, I don't know, a stand-off between science and religion. That seems like a 20th or 21st century. In the 18th century, in the Enlightenment, there's a lot of discussion about, are we just soft machines?

Was God a sort of clockmaker who sets the machine in motion? We're meat puppets. And so lots of automata get made as an experiment to see whether you can actually make a facsimile of human behaviour by mechanical means. A book came out called L'homme Machine, Man and Machine. And so they don't quite know how to express it, and the vocabulary isn't there.

But it's really in the ether, this idea of, you know, God or biology. Yes, in the early 19th century. And it goes to the heart of ideas of the soul, I suppose. Is there some sort of supernatural animating force? I suppose electricity is the natural place to look at that time. It's a new phenomenon. And the interesting thing is that Lawrence, the man who lost his professorship at the Royal College of Surgeons

as a result of that lecture, was actually Shelley's doctor and prescribed for his nervous headaches which he had a lot of and things like that. So they had a direct connection with this debate and that's what they were talking about. So Frankenstein at some level is puzzling out where does the vital

spark come from. And you know in the movies you always get a whole reel of the operation scene, you know the creation the movies, you always get a whole reel of the operation scene, the creation scene with lots of voltaic batteries and lightning and all this sort of thing. In the book, she just says, I gathered the instruments of life around me that I might infuse the spark of life into this lifeless being. That's all she says, full stop. You don't have to worry about that in fiction.

You do in the movies. And so that's not what it was about, the practicalities of it. It was the philosophical conundrum of where does the vital spark come from. I mean, just the word vital spark implies that it's singular. It's like that. You give the spark and then you're living. And I think maybe what we've learnt since then is that it's not a vital spark, but it's still electrical.

It's just... Living is that continuous flowing of electricity in the body. There's not a spark that sets it off and it keeps going. It's just doing it all the time. Noel, I was wondering on the physics of this. Do you want me to talk about

the slathes then again? No, not yet, not yet, but there will be a moment. I want you to go down to a hydrothermal vent and see if you can make all the Ramones. The thing that I find interesting is that, especially the film I want you to go down to a hydrothermal vent and see if you can make all the Ramones. But I was... The thing that I find interesting is that, especially the film versions of Frankenstein, which is, rather than just go, I'll get one body and then start it up again,

for some reason he basically goes, I know, I'll get lots of bits. Basically the equivalent, as far as I can see, of getting a clock, smashing it with a hammer, then smashing loads of other clocks with hammers, and then managing to glue them together to make a not-quite-so-good clock and go, I it with a hammer, then smashing loads of other clocks with hammers, and then managing to glue them together to make a not-quite-so-good clock and go, I must be a genius. Yeah. And I just wonder if there is... If you see

any flaws in that method. LAUGHTER There was a bit in Frankenstein, I haven't read it for a long time, but they sort of made the creature bigger because it was easier because it was quite difficult to recreate the body and the organs so they've made like a bigger version yeah he's eight foot tall right eight foot yeah but you know i think when frankenstein describes

where he gets his bits from he says charnel houses graveyards and slaughter houses right so there's animal in there as well as human which is why he's larger than life and the movies haven't really dealt with that there's bits of animal well that's as well as human, which is why he's larger than life. And the movies haven't really dealt with that. There's bits of animal in there. Well, that's what I did. I used plasticine and Fimo and some modelling clay. Just a little bit of Play-Doh for the hair. Some bits of that cat you had at university.

The thing is about it is I think that maybe she just skimmed over the scientific part because she didn't really know. She just went, and then I got some pieces of life and the eternal spark, gone. You know, sometimes when you've got something quite conceptual or quite big, a concept, maybe it's easier to just be very simple about it and not elaborate or go into any detail

because then you can... Someone can say, well, that's not true. She's quite aware. So Galvani had been doing experiments with electric shocks, twitching frogs' legs, I think they called it. And Aldini was joined with human beings. He was electrocuting the heads of corpses and things. Even the eyes would open.

All kinds of muscular twitches. He managed to get someone to stand up and his legs shot out or something. So all this was going on in that 20, 30 years before... She was young, wasn't she? She was 18. Was she at where Aldini tried to reanimate the corpse? He'd just been hung, hadn't he?

She wasn't present, but we think she heard about it. She wasn't present. She went to Humphrey Davies lectures and she certainly knew about galvanism, but I don't think she was actually there when this man Forster, who'd just been hung, was sort of reanimated by the application of a voltaic battery. I read it think she was actually there when this man Forster, who'd just been hung, was sort of reanimated by the application of a voltaic battery. I read it. It was reviewed in the Newgate advertiser.

So Aldini's attempt to reanimate this man, George Forster, who'd been hung for a murder, and they got him straight off the gallows and took him straight to the theatre. So they knew even then that you had to get someone in pretty quick if you wanted to have any chance of reanimating them. You'd better do it within an hour or two, otherwise it wouldn't work. And the description of his eye opening, popping open, is very similar to Mary Shelley's description of the creature

when his eye opens, and there's something odd about his eye. Would he have been free to go after that, or would he have? If it had worked, perhaps. I love this. I have to die twice, cos it hurts more the second time. The review at the end of it, in the paper the next day, said vitality might have been fully restored if many ulterior circumstances had not rendered this inappropriate.

So it's quite remarkable. They thought, if he'd carried on, that he might have got up. And then I suppose the question arises, what do you do with him? He's a convicted murderer. Do you go free or do you put him back in jail? That's a scientist's alibi, isn't it? Of course, I could have turned him alive again, but he is a murderer, so I didn't. But it's an interesting mixture at that time, isn't it?

You've got this kind of almost mysticism involved, that you could reanimate a corpse, but yet you've got this almost, as we said, Dawkins-esque kind of rational attack from certain sides of the scientific community. And that's what she's working through in the novel, I think. When it was reviewed, everyone treated it as a... It didn't get that many reviews,

and most of them thought it was by Shelley, because it came out anonymously, originally. But they all treated it as a philosophical novel, not science fiction, not gothic, not a horror story, but as a kind of philosophical not science fiction, not gothic, not a horror story, but as a kind of philosophical disquisition, like a metaphor for that debate, which I think is really the tone that she adopted,

particularly originally. Nick, just on the science of the creature or the monster, in terms of stitching together loads of different bodies, what would be the medical ramifications and problems? Because I presume you'd basically have the elbow rejecting the wrist and then the hand so it is going to be because i'm thinking of stopping with the research i've got to so far um but what in terms of that just looking at when you sometimes do examination of the pure science of what this would actually mean so there we go you have a body you have a head stitched on and then with a different brain put into it,

you've somehow managed to connect. What problems are going to arise? Good question. He's making notes now for the radio listeners. Robin is taking it down very carefully. He's got a diagram and everything. He's going to go home to wherever he lives. I suppose the biggest problem is that all the bits

would be to differing degrees dead. And some cells will be alive, some cells will be dead. Assuming that you were able to put them together perfectly, so all the nerves you could join them up, all the blood vessels you could join them up, and that, yes, you can start the heart beating again by electrocuting it or something, what would go wrong then? The biggest thing which is probably going to go wrong is exactly the problem with how do you get the electricity flowing again.

So this is what goes wrong when you do an organ transplant today. If you take an organ out, you put it on ice for a couple of days, you try and find someone who's got the right immunological match so that it's not going to reject, and then you put it in again. And the problem that you have is that it usually fails at that point. If you've stored it for more than a day or two, on ice this is, then it all goes wrong. And it goes wrong as soon as you reintroduce oxygen,

and what seems to be happening is, in effect, that the flow of electrons to oxygen just screws up. It will not get to oxygen properly. You produce these reactive free radicals. They attack the cell around it and it breaks down kind of cell by cell from within and to prevent that from happening

is really, really difficult. I spent several years trying to do exactly that and I got absolutely nowhere with it. So when Aldini had an executed criminal who was only an hour old, his corpse, he was doing the right thing? Well, I mean that's essentially what we're doing if you restart someone's heart by applying an electrical charge.

So, I mean, it's possible in principle to do it. In practice, an hour, if you put it on ice, then you might have got a couple of days. If you have it not on ice, then an hour's pretty much as long as you've got, if that. Yeah, and Christian Barnard, when he did the very first heart transplant, in the press conference, said,

I felt like Frankenstein. Given that we, as you've said, are reanimating the machinery, which is already extremely complex, is extremely difficult, what do we know about the origin of life, the original spark of life? Because assuming it began on earth that

means that the earth went from a living a non-living thing geology essentially to biology okay somewhere so last time i was on this show at some point i used the word proton gradients and they all burst out laughing because they knew it was going to come fairly soon. But what's going on inside us, I've been talking about the architecture. We have mitochondria. These are the power packs of cells which are producing all the electricity. This is where you've got this electrical charge, equivalent to a

bolt of lightning, across a very, very thin membrane. So five millionths of a millimetre thick is a membrane. And you've got this enormous electrical charge across it and we have something in the order of you know perhaps a thousand mitochondria in every cell so that means about 150 trillion mitochondria in your body with the covering a surface area with this charge of about four football pitches and that's what's keeping us alive and it's that

continuous flow so what's happening is we've got an electrical current with electrons coming from food and going to oxygen, and that current is powering the extrusion of protons across the membrane. Protons are the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, and that gives a charge across the membrane, and it's that which is keeping us alive. And so the question is, well, where on earth did a system as complex and as strange as that come from? And the interesting thing about the vents that I mentioned earlier is that they are, it's like a labyrinth of micropores. Each of these pores are a bit bigger than cells, as we know them, but not that much bigger. And they've got very thin walls around them. And across those walls, you have a natural proton gradient.

So one side, you've got lots of protons, the other side, very few. It gives you a natural electrical charge across natural barriers. And so you've got from the very beginning potentially a system which is capable of kind of, I hesitate to say evolve at this point, but developing step by step, potentially producing organics across those barriers and so on, and gradually becoming a cell with the same basic structure and the same electrical basis to it. You hesitate to say evolve because you need... Well, you can't say evolve until you have genes,

but you've got to get to quite a level of complexity in chemistry. I mean, this is the real challenge at the origin of life, is how do you start out with carbon dioxide and hydrogen and end up with DNA or at least proteins or something like that because you don't have natural selection until you've got that so there's a long distance to cross which is basically chemistry and something's got to drive that chemistry in the right direction and i think the thing which is driving that chemistry is electricity a single shot what i think all this shows is that in the era of genetic engineering, AI and proton gradients, et cetera,

that Frankenstein has become the real creation myth. No longer Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, but across the world, the real creation myth, in terms of intervening in these processes, is now Frankenstein. There you are. There's a thought. So do you think that now, because you were just saying, Nick, as well, the way you were using Frankenstein there was in a positive way. Can it be reclaimed as, as you were saying,

there's all the Frankenfoods and these different ways of saying, oh, human beings meddling where they shouldn't, that actually we can turn Frankenstein back into a positive icon? Well, it has been. It's, you know, there's a lot of feminist literature about how it's a critique of masculinist science. So it's looking at it as a kind of critique of the status quo in a positive way.

Yeah, and I think, you know, let's hear it for Frankenstein. Let's hear it for the scientists. You know, OK, it went wrong, and, you know, if he'd listened to his curriculum... Well, it works initially. Yes, it does. He killed a few people. And, in fact, the creature is incredibly quick on the uptake. You know, he looks through a peephole at a peasant family

reading some literature, and by the time he gets the hang of it, he can't stop talking for about 100 pages. This guy is very quick on the uptake. But in the book, though, so he emerges, the monster or the creature emerges not as a monster. And the senses in which actually the human beings and their reaction to him are the things that twisted him. If you treat someone as ugly, they become...

That's the thing where the movies take a huge shortcut, that with Karloff and even De Niro, they start off looking like a road accident at the moment the operation happens, which rather short-circuits this theme of, if you treat someone as ugly, they start to become ugly. Yeah, because he makes friends with the blind man, doesn't he, who doesn't know he's ugly. That's right. But the other thing, the thing they always get wrong is

the scars never heal. I can never understand how in Frankenstein movies that he looks exactly like he did during the operation for the rest of the movie. Two years later, he still looks as though he's just come off the slab. Also, he never takes that ridiculous jacket off. And the bulge. He did bring the DMs in

though, which I liked. That's true. That's what I. He did bring the DMs in, though, which I liked. That's true. That's true. That's what I like, that in the end, your main critique of Frankenstein is going, let's look at it from a fashion perspective. But, no, what about some Winkle posts? What about a little bit of glitter? My knowledge of Frankenstein derives from the New York Dolls song, Frankenstein.

Which is a fashion song, I think. What do you make of those? So the theory is, let's say that life began in vents. Would you have a preference? What would you like your ancestor to be? Would you like it to be a hydrothermal vent below an ocean four billion years ago, or something more romantic?

And you don't have to invite this relative to the wedding, by the way, if you're thinking... Something slightly more romantic might be ideal. This is one of my oldest relatives. It's a rock with some proton gradients in it. They might get a bit drunk later and do some embarrassing dancing, but ignore them. I don't know. I mean, it's quite fascinating.

I didn't realise it was a metaphor for all of those things. It was a long time ago that I read it, so I quite enjoyed the monster aspect. And the fact that also, I guess, the Boris Karloff thing, I'm quite visual, so for me, that image, the Boris Karloff monster, I'm not sure who designed that make-up. Jack Pierce. Yeah, but that is pretty iconic.

There's something about that that stays in your head, you know. Whereas in the book, the scientist takes the first postpartum moment just after the birth, he looks at the creature and says, beautiful. Yeah. You know, that I've chosen these limbs with great care. He's built like a Chippendale, this guy, you know, and he looks absolutely stunning, but becomes ugly. Yeah. Whereas with Karloff, I mean, you kind of know immediately that something's seriously wrong with him, don't you, when he gets up?

This is a long time before Darwin. So what was the idea at the time of the complexity of the... How did the complexity of human life emerge? Because was there a sense of evolutionary biology at the time? A little bit. I mean, Erasmus Darwin, who was Charles's grandfather, is actually name-checked in the introduction to Frankenstein by Mary Shelley that some of his experiments,

where he was a sort of proto-evolutionist, he hadn't quite got the language, and he certainly hadn't done the experiments, but he thought you could bring things back to life, you could reanimate things. But also, he said, I want to plot the journey from primeval sludge through to modern, sophisticated life. I want to, but I don't quite know how to.

So, again, the ideas were sort of in the ether, but unformed. And she knew Erasmus Darwin, and he's named... She gets one of his experiments wonderfully wrong. In her introduction, she says, I gather that he reanimated a piece of vermicelli in a glass case. Now, she's actually referring to vorticelli, which were tiny protozoan little creatures that were supposed to be reanimatable.

And also, in the same section of Erasmus Darwin's book, he talks about a mixture of flour and paste where you can see little eels reanimating themselves. And she misread it as vermicelli. So it sounds as if, you can see little eels reanimating themselves. And she misread it as vermicelli. So it sounds as if, you know, Frankenstein is reanimating pasta. Which is not an aspect that the movies have picked up on yet. But they're not close

to Noel's work, isn't it? We could fuse the two. Past the scene. It'll be amazing. Nick, we haven't dealt enough with what you're actually doing. So we've talked about the large-scale rejection of limbs in the Frankenstein method enough with what you're actually doing. So we've talked about the large-scale rejection of limbs in the Frankenstein method, but what you're actually dealing with on a molecular level,

can you run us through a little bit of that process? I mean, first of all, do you have problems from members of the public who do say, oh, you're doing Frankenstein work? No, nobody's ever accused me of that, actually. I mean, you get attacked by creationists periodically for being a scientist or an evolutionary biologist at all. But most people are fascinated by it.

I mean, I think it's partly because there is no threat of actually producing life. We are... That is not what you said on the ground yet. It's not going to work. Please give me this money, Mike. I promise it will not work. Don't tell the

research councils I said that. But it does say no chance that it could work. No, there's no chance. Right. I told you this was the wrong Nick Lane. We're not even trying to make it... We're not trying to get a cell crawling out of the top. I mean, you can't do that.

There's too many moving parts. There's too much complexity and sophistication for it to be imaginable. What you can do, though, is try and work out, well, how do these bits come together? It's almost another Frankenstein problem. How do you take this bit and that bit and get them to function together?

And so the question, you know, the question is, how do you start with gases and rocks? How do you start with a sterile planet? And how do you get them to interact in a very small, confined space in such a way that you're going to produce from those gases, you're going to start producing molecules like lipids and amino acids and you know the molecules of life we know quite a lot about when you've produced them how they will begin to uh interact with each

other it's quite easy to produce a cell-like structure a protocell it's quite easy it's not easy but it's possible to make things like r, for example, a little bit like DNA, the chain of nucleotides that make up the genetic code. So it's possible to do those things, but to get them to all interact together and to grow, I think, is way beyond us at the moment. I don't believe people who say we'll do it in five years. We're miles away from that.

What we can do, funnily enough, the kind of thing that Craig Venter is doing is taking some, you know, synthesizing his own DNA based on exactly what bacterial DNA and then inserting it into a very simple living cell. It has to be a living cell. You have to have all of that structure there. And we don't know what most

of that structure is or is coded by or how it works or what the minimum cell requirements are. So I think we're, you know, we, I hope, will be able to produce kind of sacks of protoplasm, which would not be living in any meaningful sense, but would be full of organic molecules. If we can do that in the lab in the space of a few years

in a benchtop reactor that's this big, simulating what I think would have been hydrothermal vents maybe 60, 80 meters tall, meters across, spread across the entire seafloor of the early Earth, and at depths of very often three or four kilometers, so high pressures as well, and that means that gases like hydrogen dissolved at very high concentrations. So, you know, we're trying to understand what the possible steps could be, and how they might come together in that way, but really we're trying to understand what the possible steps could be and how they might come together in that way. But really, we're trying to emulate the planet as a lab.

And of course, we're going to fail. I do find it interesting that when you look at the history of science, it seems to me there's the physical demotion that we underwent. So Copernicus, and now there seems to be no argument. Very few people are uncomfortable with the fact that the earth is a speck in an infinite universe but when you come to the origin of life which we've discussed now for 200 years since frankenstein we've had darwin 150 years ago and yet the central idea that we may be we have emerged in an undirected way spontaneously from events in an ocean or something,

is still culturally controversial, isn't it? Yeah, it certainly is. I mean, you mentioned creationists, and I'd argue that actually that's been superseded by Frankenstein. But this deals with very deep human issues, doesn't it, about who we are, in a way. But think about the reaction to Darwin in Victorian England, where the idea that we're descended from apes was difficult enough. See, I love the idea that we come from apes. That's amazing.

The only reason I'm on this show is because the word monkey is in the title. Now, this is... Because, again, the Frankenstein myth, and we do have... There are still, I believe, organisations which cryogenically freeze people, and depending on the amount of money, different amounts of people. And I wondered whether anyone of the... Walt Disney. Yeah, just his finger. Apparently that's not true. I wish it was,

but apparently Walt Disney didn't get frozen, they're now saying. He didn't? That's what they would say, the Illuminati. But I wondered whether, really, even that is a very short-sighted version, the idea that we are getting to a stage of being able to map our own brains to such a degree that you will be able to map the entirety of every detail of your own brain. Perhaps one can't say how long that's been, 20, 30 years, but if you were able to map every detail of that brain,

are we therefore going to just end up as a kind of memory chip and then we end up being you know so here you are here's the brain here is every detail of that brain and the next thing you know you're kind of descendants are sticking you in a computer game no i think we're a long way from that as well oh my god you're so pessimistic yeah what is consciousness because we we already do know we can map quite a lot of the brain. We can work out which bits of the brain are lighting up when you're thinking this or thinking that or doing something. And we know which ions are crossing which membranes

and which neurotransmitters are involved and so on. So we're already quite a long way towards being able to map out how the brain works. But I don't think we have any idea at all how that is generating what we perceive as conscious understanding and feeling of the world. There was more idea. We can edit that bit and put it into a programme that was about that. No, what I meant was that what this is partly about

is the idea of bringing things back to life. So the idea that we are, because I think that is part of what the Frankenstein story is about, bringing things back to life. So my point was rather than having to bring back this whole great big lump of matter, you might be able to get to the point of going,

we've managed to scan the whole thing, there we go, and we'll just be able to download it and recreate it in another way in millions of years' time if we ever get past the protoplasm sacks. If you've got the structure absolutely right, then it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that you could do that. But I do think we still don't really know

what an earth consciousness actually is. Oh, yeah, just a minute. So generally, it's better to get yourself frozen still. So, effectively... No, if you get yourself frozen still. So effectively... No, if you get yourself frozen again, you have the problems with structure. It's very, very difficult. It's not going to work for Walt Disney,

whether he was frozen or not. But he was an animator. Because you're going to end up with the structure being broken down from inside. What we need to do in that case is vitrify, which is to say turn to glass, so you preserve the structure. And it's possible to do in that case is vitrify, which is to say turn to glass so you preserve the structure. And it's possible to do that with smaller things. It's not possible yet to do that with a human.

It will be possible to do that at one point. What you're doing, animals can do this to themselves. They can overwinter, they can freeze in the South Pole or something. And they do it by effectively running down the electricity of the system so that they've discharged themselves almost completely. And then they've allowed themselves to freeze not with ice forming, but with this glass vitrified water, which preserves the structure of the cell. And what that does is it keeps everything in exactly the right place that it needs to be for when the

system strikes up again. Now now if we could do that then you would be able to preserve whole bodies that way and you would also whatever it is that's generating consciousness in the first place would also be preserved because whatever it is it's it's part of the structure of neurons i don't think we know quite what it is that's generating consciousness yet but we know it's to do with the structure of the nervous system. So that's those, you know your glass from your elbow. Thank you very much. What about sun-dry?

Crystal, what do you think... Let's say that we do, at some point, understand the origin of life, and so we really do see, and it's absolutely clear that life is a property of matter. We're absolutely not special, not divine. What do you think the cultural impacts of that would be? And how long do you think it would take for culture to accept that? It would take a very long time.

Well, look at the science and public debate in the late 19th century with the origin of the species. It took a very, very long time. OK, in the scientific community, it's like this thing of how scientific revolutions happen, isn't it? You start off, you know, throwing grit into the oyster. Nobody listens. Then they begin to listen. Then it changes the minds of the royal society.

And then about 50 years later, it gets into the cultural bloodstream, if you're lucky, and people begin to think like that. Well, I think you can multiply that several times with a question as big as the one you're describing. It would take a very long time. Because it's all about, I mean, yes, it's about our origins and coming to terms with a completely secular image.

Well, I mean, what you do in your TV and radio work is to say there's this kind of secular magic in it, in the sense that you look at these things and they're wonderful and you don't need anything supernatural or spiritual to enhance that wonder. And I agree with you about that. But I think it takes a very long time to get your head round that thought.

But we communicate much faster now, don't we, with the internet and stuff, so people would have access to information much quicker. Yeah, and there's an awful lot of junk out there which shows that you can communicate in lots of different ways. I mean, you know, the antis would be as strong as the pros, I think, on the internet. I think that's exactly it. A lot of people

are perfectly comfortable with that idea already, but the more people who are comfortable with the idea, the more resistance there is, and the people who are very uncomfortable with that idea. And what is interesting is the way you put it, you almost say that the understanding the origin of life would be a disproval of God,

the absolute scientific rejection. That's what you implied. It would to creationists, but not to people who have a more sophisticated notion of how things first started. I think when you get on onto cosmological constants and things, we're onto your terrain. The origin of life, a lot of people can deal with the idea,

religious people can deal with the idea of a perfectly naturalistic origin of life so long as God set everything in motion in the first place. I don't have any idea where the cosmological constants came from. I try to read these books periodically and I fail to finish them or understand them. It seems like a very simple

rational problem, really. I don't think we're so far away from understanding it. We're a long way away from doing it. Just to clarify what I was saying before as well, I don't think it's going to work. What's the point of doing the experiment then? The point of doing the experiment

is that that's where you get the understanding from. That's what science does. You test specific ideas, you reject some, you accept provisionally others. And so the point of the experiments is not to recreate life but it's to understand how the steps could

lead to it. So really it's about intellectual understanding, but the way to get that understanding is by practical laboratory experiments. I say bring back the Norse gods. They were a lot more fun. But I wonder, a lot of the work you do, Noel, there's a level of kind of magical quality to it, with both the Bouch and the solo stuff you've done.

Do you think there is a way, really, where you can be both kind of, you know, empirical but also find some form of what I would call benevolent mysticism? Yeah, I think so, yeah. I think maybe, though, when you're writing something that's supposed to be entertaining, then you always tend to veer towards things like magic because they're quite exciting and unknown and i don't they sort of work in terms of plot if you say oh you know if you're trying to

get across some sort of surreal or unusual idea and you sort of bring magic into the equation now we sort of found with the bush often we'd want to explore quite a lot of magical concepts so we we lived with a shaman who was totally useless a south london shaman but it gave us my brother played him but it gave us access to magic magic if we needed it you know if we and then people sort of buy it enough to go along with the episode you know otherwise because we didn't want to get too involved in the science of stuff because we didn't know and a we didn't know enough about it and b that's when you open up that whole arena, then people say, well, that wouldn't happen because of this. So I think with magic, people sort of...

There's a sense that, oh, maybe that could have happened. Because we just... There are still some forms of magic that happen, black magic and stuff, where we can't explain things that have gone on. No. No. I've really, really gone down the wrong road here, haven't I?

This whole show's given me a panic attack. I think you're going to have another scrap, actually, if you're not careful. So are you any closer, Noel, do you think, after the half hour on this, do you think you're a little bit closer to being able to reanimate that cat you were talking about, or not? Maybe. Animate, not reanimate.

Maybe that's what... Yeah, you see, animation is a little... CGI is a bit like what Frankenstein was doing, and maybe Mickey Mouse was Walt Disney's creature. And that's why he was frozen. So I'm just going to get in the frozen section at Tesco Metro with the chickens. Hopefully in 1,000 years someone will bring me back.

I'll be like the Oracle. They might not get all the bits of you, you just end up with a great big chicken head. People will go, it's what he would have wanted. I've seen his early work. He definitely would have loved to have had a big roast chicken head. So you reckon if you go into a freezer in Tesco, then in 1,000 years someone will go into Tesco

looking for a chicken and go I really fancy some turkey, what's this? Weird goth. And I reckon I could reanimate that because this guy Nick Lane from a thousand years ago had shown us how. I think that's what's going to happen.

What happened when you got cross then? Is it because I talked about magic being real in some way and you wouldn't accept that? No, just because it isn't, that's what's going to happen. What happened when you got cross then? Is it because I talked about magic being real in some way and you wouldn't accept that? Well, no, just because it isn't, that's all. Right. Fairly black and white. But getting back to Tesco, a friend of mine... Of course.

A friend of mine overheard in the supermarket this wonderful line. Someone had just bought a box of chicken legs and the lady said to the cashier, are you sure they're all from the same bird? So that's definitely... That's not normally the kind of point we'd end on, but today it is. I mean, definitely, because that's very reasonable.

And I want to... See, I'm kind of with you, Noel. Sometimes you just go, ah, do you just go, let's just call it magic. If it's benevolent, it's fine, why not? Let's have a bit of fun with that. I've built a whole career on believing in unicorns and fairies, so I'm not going to go against that now. I don't actually believe in them, but they believe in me,

so it gets quite awful. Nothing worse than having so many fictional followers, is there? So we asked the audience a question, and that question today was, if you were making a monster, whose body parts would you find particularly useful? And we did also say, please remember this goes out on Radio 4 at 4.30pm.

Nevertheless, we still had quite a few involving Brian. Look, it doesn't matter, so let's... Alan Bennett's vocal cords. Then, at least, when the monster went on its murderous rampage, the corresponding monologue would be charming and twee. That is lovely, isn't it? We belong dead, because I was looking behind the sofa and I found the fingers of a golem.

Brian Cox and Brian Blessed! My monster will have perfect hair and a perfect beard. That would be a fascinating thing. See, it would be fine if it was you and Brian, like Blessed's voice, but the other way round is really weird. Imagining big Brian Blessed going, and the wonderful thing is that Gordon is alive. Or dead.

In fact, he's in a linear superposition. Superposition. The Jean-Luc Picard, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. My monster will boldly go where no-one has been before, but will be able to make a U-turn at a moment's notice and then frightening enough to scare the wits out of anyone. That's a really weird mix, because now I'm imagining Jean-Luc Pigard with Donald Trump's hair,

which is not... That could be very easily sorted out, I imagine. And we'll just find out the manufacturer. And so, thank you very much to our guests, who have been Professor Nick Lanes, Christopher Frayling and Noel Fielding! Thank you! And we

leave you with a quote from Mary Shelley's introduction to Frankenstein, which is, And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny to go forth and prosper. So, thanks very much, hideous progeny. We'll see you again at some point. And thank you, Brian, not hideous progeny, lest you see the truth, what lurks beneath this Stepford physicist.

Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye. APPLAUSE Till now nice again. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet. We are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories

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